[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]

San Francisco – November 14, 2012 –
Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and
development tools, is proud to announce Unity 4.0 is now available
for download. Unity 4, announced in June, will consist of a series
of updates designed to improve the product through an extensive
improvement of existing tech and the rollout of new features.

The first in a series of updates for Unity 4, this version
includes significant additions such as DirectX 11 support and
Mecanim animation tools. In addition users will have access to a
Linux deployment preview and the Adobe® Flash® Player
deployment add-on.

“Unity 4 will see the addition of an incredible number of
new, highly advanced, features and continuous improvement across
the tech to be released in smaller, faster increments than Unity
has seen in the past,” said David Helgason, CEO, Unity
Technologies. “It’s an exciting time for Unity and the
4.0 release marks the beginning of a great new era for our
technology.”

Mecanim – Stunning Character Animation

Mecanim, Unity’s powerful and innovative animation
technology, is setting new industry standards for tools in
integrated development environments allowing the creation of
complex state machines, blend trees, IK rigging, and auto retarget
animations to characters of different sizes and shapes, all inside
of the Unity editor. Developers will find a sizeable selection of
retargetable animations available in the Unity Asset Store:
http://unity3d.com/unity/asset-store/.

DirectX 11

With the ability to take advantage of full DirectX 11 support,
including shader model 5, tessellation for smoother models and
environments in game worlds, and compute shaders for advanced GPU
computation, Unity 4.0 empowers developers. DirectX 11 support
development was aided by development of the Butterfly Effect demo:
http://unity3d.com/promo/butterfly/.

High-end Visual Capabilities for All Platforms

Unity 4.0 also features real-time shadows on mobile, skinned
mesh instancing, the ability to use normal maps when baking
lightmaps, and a refined GPU profiler. It’s easy to make
extremely high-end visuals that scale across the best of
what’s available on modern PCs and the most advanced mobile
graphics chips.

Adobe Flash Player Add-on

The Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on will empower developers
to publish their new and existing titles to one of the
world’s most ubiquitous gaming platforms on the web. With the
wealth of incredible features in the 4.0 release, Unity is the most
powerful development pipeline for creating high quality 2D and 3D
content for Adobe Flash Player. The add-on is now available for
sale in the Unity store:
https://store.unity3d.com/.

Linux Publishing Preview

Unity 4.0 will also include a preview of a new deployment option
to publish games to Desktop Linux, clearing a path for the Unity
community to bring exciting new content to the PC market’s
most voracious indie gamers. Desktop Linux standalone publishing
will be available for all Unity 4 users at no additional cost.

Unity 4 introduces many additional features and
improvements, including: